The US-Backed Drug War in Mexico Has Never Been Deadlier

The Trump administration is continuing to help
the Mexican government wage a war on drugs despite a recent report
that more than 33,000 Mexicans were killed in 2018, a new record.

According to Mexico’s Secretariat of Security and Citizen Protection, there
were 33,341
homicides in Mexico in 2018. The number of deaths broke the record from
the previous year, when 28,866 Mexicans were killed.

Much of the violence is the result of the country’s long-running drug war.
Since the Mexican government began deploying its military forces around the
country in December 2006 to confront drug cartels, more than 100,000 Mexicans
have died in drug-related violence.

The US government has been fueling
the war with the Mérida
Initiative, a multi-billion dollar program of assistance that has provided
Mexican security forces with aircraft, training, and equipment.

"We will continue to be relentless against the criminals and narco-traffickers,"
former US President Barack Obama pledged
in 2016.

Over the past two years, the fate of the Mérida Initiative has increasingly
been called into question, however, as major political changes in the United
States and Mexico have disrupted the bilateral relationship. The election of
Donald Trump in 2016 has left many US officials wondering whether they can preserve
their partnership with the Mexican government.

Last year, former US Ambassador to Mexico Roberta Jacobson repeatedlywarned
that Trump’s demeaning rhetoric about Mexicans significantly undermined US standing
in Mexico. It has become "increasingly
difficult" for US diplomats to "lecture" and "cajole"
Mexican officials, she said.

Another major change, the election of leftist politician Andrés Manuel
López Obrador as Mexico’s new president, has added to the concerns in
Washington. During his victory speech, López Obrador promised to take
a new approach with the drug war. "The failed strategy of combating insecurity
and violence will change," López Obrador said.

Still, little has actually changed in how the US and Mexican governments have
been waging the war. Last year, Congress appropriated another $139
million for the Mérida Initiative, a slight increase from the previous
year. The Department of Defense added another $63.3
million in counternarcotics assistance for the Mexican military.

"The Mérida Initiative continues to be the United States’ primary
vehicle to meet shared U.S.-Mexico security priorities," State Department
official Richard Glenn told
Congress.

So far, López Obrador has not made any major moves to curtail the program.
Although the new Mexican president declared on January 30 that the
drug war is over, he has kept Mexican military forces deployed throughout
the country. He recently announced that he is sending
federal troops into Tijuana, where violence has been surging.

In one of the clearest signs of his intentions, López Obrador has been
trying to create a new National
Guard of 60,000 troops to confront the nation’s drug cartels.

Human rights organizations, which have been highly critical of the war, areopposed
to the plan. They report that similar attempts in the past have failed to improve
security in Mexico.

López Obrador "is making a colossal mistake that could undercut
any serious hope of ending the atrocities that have caused so much suffering
in Mexico in recent years," said
José Miguel Vivanco, the Americas director at Human Rights Watch.

In the meantime, both the Trump administration and the US mass media continue
to largely ignore the role played by the United States in the drug war. They
blame the country’s drug cartels for the growing violence and rarely
have anything to say about the Mérida Initiative.

Violence in Mexico "is a big contributor to the Humanitarian Crisis taking
place on our Southern Border," Trump recently tweeted.
Much of it is "caused by DRUGS."

As usual, Trump keeps pointing to his proposed border wall as a solution. "Wall
is being built!" he tweeted. What goes unmentioned is the fact that the
Mérida Initiative continues to fuel the violence while Trump’s harsh
migration policies prevent many of the war’s victims from being able to seek
refuge in the United States.

Edward Hunt writes about war and empire. He has a PhD in American Studies
from the College of William & Mary.